November @ Amii | Supply Chain AI West, REMI Agriculture Cohort & New Job Opportunities

Hi there,

I hope you and yours are doing well. Now more than ever, the Amii team are taking time to connect with one another to stay motivated during these challenging times. Recently, we participated in the Extra Life gaming marathon to raise money for the Stollery Children's Foundation. I'm grateful for the opportunity to lead a caring team who truly demonstrate our mission and values each day. 

This month, we're thrilled to announce a new accelerator stream for early-stage startups: Supply Chain AI West. Made possible with funding from SCALE AI, this program is designed to accelerate high-performing technical teams working in the supply chain space. We're on the lookout for 10 ventures to join us for intensive coaching and training in 2021. 

Our commitment to reducing GHG emissions continues with the REMI, Reducing Emissions through Machine Intelligence, program. Applications are now open for our Agriculture Spring 2021 cohort. I look forward to learning more about innovations in the agri-tech industry as we onboard new clients to this program. 

See you over video chat soon, 

Cam

November Highlights: Research, Industry and Training 

Industry & Community Updates:

• Congratulations to Amii Fellow Alona Fyshe for being named in Edify Edmonton's Top 40 Under 40!
• The latest AI in Health event gathered members of the AI and health communities together for an exciting conversation on Learning Health Systems -- watch it now! 
• Our October Virtual AI Meetup featured Amii Fellow Patrick Pilarski on how reinforcement learning agents experience time and Amii ML Scientist Luke Kumar on using ML to predict Opioid dispense risk -- if you missed it, catch it here!
• Amii Fellow and Professor at UAlberta Randy Goebel gave an online presentation as part of the Applied AI Summit (AISUM) in Japan.
• Congrats to AltaML, who received more than 500 applications to its new data science internship program

Research Updates:

• The 2020 Tea Time Talks blog post series has now concluded, with weeks nine, ten, eleven and twelve now live! Dive into these 20-minute talks on interesting research topics -- from creating more effective language models to reinforcement learning for robots.
• Amii research papers and demos were profiled at the 16th annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2020).
• Also profiling Amii research papers this month is the conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020), taking place November 16-20. 

Training Updates:

• We’ve launched our Machine Learning Fundamentals 1 & 2 sessions! These facilitated, one-day workshops are designed to provide a high-level overview of applied machine learning using real-world cases. Sign up for the next ML Foundations 1 session on December 3.
• A reminder that we still have two fantastic specializations available on Coursera: the Reinforcement Learning Specialization taught by Fellows and Canada CIFAR AI Chairs Martha White (Associate Professor, UAlberta) & Adam White (Assistant Professor, UAlberta), and the Machine Learning: Algorithms in the Real World Specialization taught by our Managing Director of Applied Science, Anna Koop.

Upcoming Event

November 19: Virtual AI Meetup

Gather with the brightest minds in the AI community from Edmonton and beyond at Amii’s Virtual AI Meetup! Learn about the latest tools and techniques in machine learning, and explore topics that researchers and industry professionals are thinking about or working on. November features Nirav Raiyani (Research Engineer - Process & Machine Learning at Ntwist) and Jasmine Wang (Founder & CEO of copysmith.ai).

RSVP today!

November 20: AI Seminar – Emilie Kaufmann

This talk will revolve around two performance criteria that have been studied in the context of episodic reinforcement learning: an old one, Best Policy Identification (BPI) [Fiechter, 1994], and a new one, Reward Free Exploration (RFE) [Jin et al., 2020]. 
RSVP today!

December 4: AI Seminar – Cynthia Rudin

Models and their predictions are often made easier to understand by adding interpretability constraints. These constraints make the model simpler, but can make optimization harder. In this talk, Cynthia asks: can we show that a simple-but-accurate machine learning model might exist for our problem, before actually finding it? She presents an easy calculation to check for the possibility of a simpler model, indicating that simpler-but-accurate models do exist in practice more often than one might think.
RSVP today!

See a full list of Amii and partner events on our Events page.

Supply Chain AI West

Supply Chain AI West is Amii’s first accelerator stream and is focused on creating the disciplined environment required for founders to establish an AI strategic direction and begin execution while bringing together a community of experts to provide advice and access to their extended networks.  

Programming is designed to expose startups and early-stage founders to the opportunities available to create AI-powered supply chains, and includes: 

• Training: Access to facilitated and self-directed workshops and courses including ML Foundations 1 and 2, AI Planning and Initiating sessions, and a dedicated study group for online learning produced by Amii on the Coursera platform. 
• Coaching: Through dedicated time with an applied AI scientist, participants will gain insight into their specific challenges and opportunities related to AI adoption, while working towards executing their first proof of concept ML model. 
• Demo Day: At the conclusion of the program, participants will showcase their work to  members of the AI ecosystem including researchers, business leaders, funders and investors. In preparation for this opportunity, startups will receive investor relations mentorship with an AI lens. 

Supply Chain AI West is available to 10 ventures that share SCALE AI and Amii’s vision of positioning Canada as a global leader in AI and supply chain management. To make up the cohort of 10 ventures, Amii is seeking seven startups. Additionally, up to three places will be considered for early-stage founders looking for a de-risked and supportive environment to begin their business through participation in a cohort-based program.

Career Opportunities

• We’re looking for a Machine Learning Project Manager here at Amii! If you have exceptional business and project management skills, visit the job posting.
• EZ Ops is seeking a full-time Data Scientist to join their team! Take a look at their job posting.

Recommended Readings 

• Diagnosing Schizophrenia: Learn about this landmark discovery from Amii Fellow Russ Greiner, using machine learning to aid the diagnosis of mental disorders
• How a U of A grad helps businesses harness the power of AI: The University of Alberta News spoke to Amii ML Educator Stephanie Husby about her experience teaching non-technical managers and executives about AI adoption.

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